The author is completely inexperienced and without any sort of mentoring. The natural tendency of an organization is, well, meetings. So without experience and a guiding hand, it tends to rot into the hellscape that is presented in the article.
I know you don't go to them every day but you aren't required to go to all of your teams' agile ceremonies (standups, etc.). They can be handled by the teams and their scrum master, which would be covered by your sync with the SM and your team members. That frees up some time, if you need it. Personally, I'm a big fan of managers being so busy managing that they don't have time for work. Keeps them from writing code. ;-)
> Weddings are ceremonies. Meetings at work are just meetings. Sometimes stuff in this field gets so ridiculous and pompous sounding.
I like that they're called ceremonies because it highlights just how ridiculous and pompous this cargo culting has become. To me a ceremony means mostly pointless tradition that is way overdressed.
Our team can put all that stuff in a box and say "we avoid ceremony", and the kind of people that we want to work with will appreciate that and want to work with us.
It is definitely a thing. And for big projects it can be helpful. But in most cases I think a scrum master should probably handle multiple projects if that is going to be their dedicated role.
Yes. We had a team of 20 with 2 scrum masters, because they wanted to grow the team, and they had 2 scrum masters available. It was ridiculous. But don't worry, they will manage to fill their time with meetings. Just try to avoid them.
Oh lord, yes. The scrum masters at my last gig had no technical knowledge at all. All kinds of certifications for scrum, had no idea about actual software development.
I find it amusing that Agile and Scrum have been around for literally decades now, and we still have substantial disagreement in the industry over what exactly they are. IMO, it hints strongly at the lack of substance.
Absolutely a thing. Our dedicated agile lead establishes and "runs" a 15-person standup, story refinements three days a week, a short S2 standup three days a week, sprint planning, product increment (three-sprint groupings) planning and pre-planning meetings, a demo and a retrospective and a standing "team lead AMA" every sprint, and handles setting up inter- and intra-team discussions when that need is expressed in standup or via slack. Also, they maintain "Program" section on our team wiki, set up story boards and pull team velocity metrics, and generally work full time doing all the things that I would be doing for these teams as a team lead, if they weren't there.
Having been without an agile lead for a couple months this summer, I'm acutely aware of how much they do, because they're often doing things that I was just letting drop on the floor as non-emergency.
Most of those things are busy work, and provide no actual benefit to a team being productive. I've worked on a lot of teams, and the teams with this amount of planning structure tend to be the ones that perform the worst, while also having the most unhappy members. It sounds like you're spending a pretty considerable amount of time in meetings!
If you need an agile lead, there's something seriously messed up in the management of your org.
There were three dedicated scrum masters at a previous job - two seemed to watch Youtube all day and eventually left and the other one read about tech all day and got made redundant.
The scrum masters that survived did dev work as well.
It's absolutely a thing. We have a guy with no technical or product management responsibilities who is the "scrum master." He doesn't know how to use Jira, and seemingly delegates everything to one of his direct reports. Last meeting he literally phoned it in from a soccer game.
I did actually complain about him to my own manager. It didn't go well.
"Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"
Good ones spend most of their time in meetings or preparing for them. Bad ones tend to have a lot of free time or waste the teams time with pointless crap.
To be a full time position generally involves a lot of administrative work or covering multiple teams. Talking to management is kind of a catch all but generally it’s interfacing with the rest of the world outside of clients. Legwork on security clearances, making sure all the boxes on contracts are checked, and or enduring the team has all the hardware software they need etc.
It tends to be more important in less software oriented companies.
"Are you a manager and think I’m terrible at time management? Which meetings would you cut?"
The immediate thing that raises questions is your meetings with "Team #1" and "Team #2", which is a bit unusual. General practice is that it takes a manager per team; so if you're managing two teams yourself then it's expected that you'll be overloaded (and if there's not many people then perhaps you can't afford the overhead of managing them as two separate teams and need to "merge" them in practice, having one common meeting instead of two separate ones) and on the other hand if there are separate team leads for these teams, then I'd argue that you don't need to participate in as many direct meetings as you do and instead delegate more to them and the teams themselves. If you "need to know" then perhaps review the meeting minutes without direct participation.
You don't know how he's defining 'team' in this context. I often organize management of my big-T Team by referring to groups of teammates focused on a particular task or project as a small-t team, especially if they're on-going tasks. So this week I had a couple of people working on a 'team' covering API issues, another group covering IAM, and another set on key management.
But then this reply is just full of "I don't actually know what your on-the-ground reality is, but that definitely won't stop me from telling you what you're doing wrong".
Well, I'm answering an explicit question by the OP based on the information provided; but my observation from the schedule is that he seems to be running two teams as if they are big-T Teams - if those are actually two small-t teams of four people each, then IMHO he should devote less meeting time to each of them or merge some of the meetings.
In your big-T Team, would you schedule a separate daily standup for each of the task/project small-t team you're supervising, and organize separate social events for each of your "groups of teammates" as OP is doing?
Sorry to be overly negative/confrontational/whatever, but an annoyingly frequent (for me...once a quarter or so) part of my own "what does this engineering boss do all day" is push back on people who have no idea what my team does every day or how they do it, or what makes them as productive as they are or even what the output eventually is, drop by to tell me what they think I should be doing (usually accompanied by a rep from the PMO and shilling a new tool to enable said 'way I should be doing it').
If all you have is a hammer...
On the other hand, I get a lot of managers who ask my opinion about how they are running things, which for me starts with "why did you make the decisions you made up to now and tell me what is or is not working", not "let me give you my dissertation on the One True Way...".
IMHO he should devote less meeting time to each of them or merge some of the meetings.
Fair enough, "less time in meetings" is always something to pursue. Perhaps aggressively, even ruthlessly. Lawyers schedule meetings in 6m increments and I've considered it. Unless the OP can't, for any number of reasons. Which we don't know.
N.B. - I get lots of time back teaching people that if you think you only need 15m, then it's pretty easy to only schedule 15m and not 30m just because it's the default (in Outlook).
would you schedule a separate daily standup for each of the task/project small-t team you're supervising
Since 'standup' implies things that do not apply to how my team organizes work, I'm pretty sure 'no'. You'd need to know that to advise. Kinda my point.
and organize separate social events for each of your "groups of teammates" as OP is doing
I see:
4:30 PM — Going-away get together for team #2 member
Which in no way implies separate social events.
If you mean:
9:00 AM — Holidays peak preparation meeting for team #1
1:00 PM — Holidays peak preparation meeting for team #2
I guess it could be social. But since it explicitly says "peak", I'm slightly skeptical that in the real world it means anything other than organizing operational coverage when lots of people are taking time off for whatever they're working on.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
fwiw, nearly every software engineering manager (at least at the senior level) at my work runs two teams. That said, you hit the nail on the head: delegate. My tech leads are my default catch-all, but we have an owner on the team for different things. One engineer goes to security related meetings. Another is running point on proj_a and another running proj_b. The other thing to do is block out time on your calendar to have time dedicated focus time. You can't get anything done in 30min. You need a 60-120min block on your calendar.
A lot of the ideas and heuristics for one-on-ones came from “high output management” which was published in 1983.
I’ve been doing this tech stuff a long time. Companies I worked at started doing regular 1 on 1s before regular use of instant messaging. More importantly, the heuristics most use for 1 on 1s clearly came before use of instant messaging and digital collaboration tools.
I do biweekly. It's my job to keep myself appraised of what reports are working on and make sure they are unblocked. A 1:1 should be focused on long-term career goals and relationship building which can be done biweekly.
The obvious exceptions are new hires and very junior engineers who need more handholding while they ramp up.
Yeah this is what struck me, the fact that the 1:1s were so out of sync with the standups. Realistically this manager is probably making the same mistake most managers initially make, which is failing to manage up, and failing to take a role strategically shaping the company. Mostly, the 30 minutes "So what are all the things you've stored up to talk to me about" conversations aren't that valuable, the more free-form broader conversations are. Especially in covid.
Well, let's put it like this: the wrong reason for a manager to cut a 1:1 to biweekly is because they don't have enough time in their calendar to support their directs. A better reason would be because there isn't enough time between 1:1s to fill out the weekly meetings.
But the manager isn't the person who can easily make that judgement call. IMO, the correct person to judge that is the direct -- they can't just show up at their managers desk and demand a 30 minute meeting when something important shows up, whereas a manager can (and often does!)
1 on 1's did not use to be 'a thing', and we still got plenty done in those days, which were not that long ago.
Generally ideas like this seem to spread because it was part of some successful company and so it got written up and now a lot of people copy it because it's easy to copy and they think it will help make their own company successful.
As a result, the thing that actually occurs in a lot of places is a manager reading from a script that they've been trained on a little bit from someone else.
Take it into your own hands. It's your time. Bring stuff to it. You won't always have an amazing manager, but you can get a lot out of it if you are proactive IMO.
Also, I think all managers should be asking what cadence and length of time their directs want for 1:1.
The least would be 30 minutes bi-weekly IMO.
The most would be 1 hour weekly.
Depends on the person, the projects, where they are in their career, etc.
I have 20 years of experience in this field, and a vital part of the job is communicating well with other people. I do not need someone's "Management Best Practices Checklist" in order to do that. And I do not think I'm exceptional: most of us got by just fine without all this.
These things are mostly not based on opinions where teams get to pick and choose, but some kind of received wisdom that checks a box on someone's list of Best Management Practices and everyone is forced to go through the script, like it or not.
That's why I'm suggesting you take control and turn the meeting into what you want it to be. It doesn't have to be a checklist but it sounds like you -have- to have this meeting at the company you are at. So instead of suffering through it, you can turn it into something beneficial for you. Ya know?
1:1's are a good way to make room for reports to voice concerns, uncertainties, mistakes, backlogs, blockers and unknowns with their manager. If you're the kind of person who feels completely comfortable promptly voicing that sort of thing in front of your team, then good for you, but you're in the minority. If your manager is excellent at consistenrtly handling that in a way that feels good to the whole team, then good for your manager, but they're in the minority.
For one example, a manager who has regular 1:1s with their reports probably won't be blindsided when they quit or miss a deadline.
That's the theory. In practice it's a checkbox with an accompanying script in a lot of places. Most places that I've been that worked well, you could send an email or walk over and ask a manager if you could schedule a bit of time to talk, if you needed something.
And if you're proactive, and don't feel like you're wasting your manager's time, again, good for you.
For reports who need a bit of a support in raising issues, this is an effective way to make that space. People new to lecturing are often taught to count out 30 seconds after asking questions, for a good reason: silence is awkward, and questions are the salve that even shy students will reluctantly reach for.
Not only I find the fakeness of 1:1s appalling, I also think that putting your weekly fix of human-relationship in a timebox is great to make me want to go through the meeting like a robot and avoid any other contact with the person outside of it.
I have a personal relationship with my manager, and we often chat outside of our 1:1s. We spend our 1:1s talking about work stuff, and end the meeting early if there isn't enough work stuff to talk about. When we're in the mood to chat person-to-person, that happens organically. When we need to talk business outside of the 1:1, that's more structured. I consider this distinction to be a healthy boundary; you may benefit from the same.
I second.
To add, I work on a pretty busy team. It’s hard to catch time to just talk to my manager and having that time carved out every week to talk is valuable.
Also, there is stuff that needs to be discussed that shouldn’t be in an email or be discussed out in the open. You know, things meetings are actually good for.
> there is stuff that needs to be discussed that shouldn’t be in an email or be discussed out in the open
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it sounds unhealthy to have that much of that kind of stuff that you'd need to discuss it with no record of it on a regular basis.
My 1on1s are useful. It's like any other meeting. Have an agenda or cancel it. The people I work with are good about canceling meetings. The standing spot is nice to have.
It's a fair point that their input on the matter is more important than mine. I like to reiterate that 1-1s are for them, not me. But my feelings are not formed in a vacuum independent of theirs. Plus if it's about the relationship, both sides should have some input and opinion.
I think weekly is great! They don't have to go for the full time, but when I was an EM, it was the one time of the week where my attention was fully on the other person. That's great for the employee because they can bring things up and it's great for the EM because if there are any subtle issues (dissatisfaction) it's a chance to catch them early.
I have minions who want it to be every two weeks.
I have minions who are happier if it is weekly.
I have minions who do not want them regularly, but want the option on occasion.
These are all simultaneously fine. When I miss one with a weekly regular, nobody frets. When I miss one with a biweekly, I make sure to reschedule if it makes sense. And I always make time ASAP for someone who doesn't usually want that meeting, when they ask for it.
Probably avoid calling people minions if you can. Do you want to come across as someone who manages unimportant simpletons, or do you want to be perceived as someone who manages smart and interesting people? Build up those below you, don't knock them down - everyone wins.
I found it refreshingly honest. Most of us aren't landing people on Mars or working on a cure for cancer here. Most of us are, infact, relatively unimportant (including the guy managing minions.)
The people who speak like this in my experience typically use that kind of terminology to highlight their own superiority, not realising that it has the opposite effect.
I have no idea about your performance, I'm sure you're a great manager. I only noted your word choice because I've seen people talking this way about their reports and it doesn't reflect well on them.
Have you seen people talking about themselves like that? Because that's how "minion" is frequently used humorously, and I was assuming that OP was channeling that.
A lot of this seems like things that could be cut. 1.5h every day on post-mortem meetings stands out as the obvious time sink – does the organisation really have that many production issues to debrief every day? Also a fair amount of ceremony, planning and pro-bono. Webinar for distributed ledgers in enterprise??
The things that truly matter – 1:1s, own team stand-ups... - only take about 8 hours per week.
Maybe a naive question but do you really need 1:1s every week? At my first startup we did them like every 2 months and it was a treat. If you needed something in between you just asked for it. At my second company even once every two weeks seemed sort of ridiculous, at first it was a welcome excuse to not work for an hour and eventually they just got boring and took me away from things I liked working on.
I think somebody's going to say "you or your manager were failing to extract what you could from those meetings, that's why they seemed useless," or something like that. But I really just think they weren't necessary to do that often.
I don't think 1:1s have to be weekly as a hard rule, but it's a good starting point.
If bi-weekly works for you and your reports, do that. However I would argue that 1:1 is the one area you shouldn't try to minimise - as a manager, spending time coaching and developing your reports is a large part of your job. The time you spend on them should be highly valuable. If you or your reports think 1:1s are a waste of time, something is going wrong and you need to change how you do that.
If we're talking coaching then having a weekly learning session would be good.
It would be even better to share it with more people and have a mini lesson.
I wouldn't call it 1:1, even if I did similar things because the company we worked for mandated 1:1s religiously and we were out of things to talk about.
If a 1:1 is just a way to surface problems with the employee and plan skills progression, weekly is way too much.
Even monthly, there is hardly something new going on, in my experience.
I think this happens because of deep issues with how companies operate, which is a frustrating and painful issue to deal with upper management.
The problem with skill progressions in most companies I've seen is that they're something meant to retain engineers, while what engineers are hired for is to build a product. Once you're not a junior engineer anymore, you have probably seen all the technical tasks you can do. What are you going to learn next? Functional programming? Cool, it will come in handy to fix pixels on buttons.
Some companies are better than others. From what I've seen, it's worse where skills progressions are basically irrelevant for promotions and raises and the only factors that matter are product related.
It's hard for an engineer to get the time out of their busy schedules. I've seen two types of engineers. Those who don't care about their career and spend as much company time learning something to show off at their next interview and those who care so much about the product that they don't have time.
I'm sure just the notion of these factors being in play influence the way mentees portray themselves to mentors. If you don't trust your mentor and you know there is no punishment or reward for not learning whatever skill is important to learn, you'll just say you didn't have time to learn it and focus on the product.
Engineers are always busy but IME their schedules are typically clearer than managers; be careful!
I promote explicitly scheduled focus time (ex: 4 hours twice a week of "GSD"). Also a good manager will know when they really don't need to probe on current health & status and happily call a meeting early. I wish more meetings ended with "we're done 30 minutes early!"
> However I would argue that 1:1 is the one area you shouldn't try to minimise
It should also be a scheduling priority. A 1:1 may not seem super important, but it's often the only time an employee will have to talk with their boss. Repeatedly cancelling it (especially last-minute) is an indicator that your employees are not a priority and that can destroy trust and kill morale.
100% agree. If you are a manager, dont cancel 1:1s unless it is a legit emergency. if someone schedules over it, tell them you cant do it because you have a 1:1 and you dont reschedule those. These are the most important meetings on a managers calendar. any org that treats them differently will not be as successful and employees will not feel as supported, as they could be.
I rarely get anything from my 1:1 which is one hour every two weeks.
Most reasons for the call could be replaced just by emailing agenda items to me, and allowing me to respond with any issues, then based on that and what is on the agenda we could decide to have a call but most of the time we wouldn't. And if we did to get past something in particular, it would be like 10 minutes not 60.
My manager is not technical though and can't really coach me about much. It seems strange that 1:1 time would be used to coach and develop technical staff -- what do you mean by this exactly? Some kind of training?
I think in general you'll get out what you put in. 1:1 should be your time, your agenda. If it's a status meeting it's being done wrong. If you aren't setting the agenda and bringing things to talk about, goals to discuss, questions, etc. I think you are missing out. If your manager isn't pushing you to bring those things (many don't, but should) take it into your own hands. Shows that you own your development plan, and that is always a plus.
Manager is very open and always asks me to bring any issue I have, asks me about it on the calls etc. I do bring things to talk about when I have them. Which is not very often because most things I have can be done far quicker and more precisely with a written record I can refer back to on slack.
I am not the one who schedules these 1:1 meetings though. Manager is. Cardinal rule of meetings should be only schedule them if you have an achievable goal for them which is not better achieved with email or IM. And the goal can't be "talk about X".
I don't have a strong desire to push back against it. My schedule is not one that is full of meetings, and most of the ones I do have are interesting and enjoyable technical ones. And the manager is a nice person who means well and probably gets pressure from above to schedule them. And blabbering on for 30 minutes per week isn't terrible. It's just not at all productive or useful for me to be spending that long on a 1:1 as far as I can see.
Just a thought, but maybe your manager does have a goal for these meetings? Maybe checking on your wellbeing, keeping an eye on your engagement etc? I can get a lot from a casual chat with someone. Just because you don't personally benefit from a meeting doesn't mean someone else doesn't.
For my team members, one of my reports started an agenda doc with the things they wanted to talk about allowing us to stay focused, I add things to the doc too and it works really well. When we have nothing on the agenda, we don't have the one on one. It worked so well, I now do it with all of my reports (and the peers and management types that I report to).
He generally puts together an agenda and does ask about how I'm doing, always asks whether I have any problems or want to talk about anything.
Don't get me wrong at all, he's a lovely person and means well. The 1:1 does not irritate me as such, my week is not loaded up with meetings. If that was different, I would gently try to change things. I also think he is getting pressure from above to meet various metrics like 1:1 time.
I just don't get much out of it that couldn't be replaced by a couple of minute slack or email once in a while when things come up. And I accept it might work well for others.
It’s hard to give concrete recommendations because everybody’s company/role/background is different, but two things that really stand out to me:
1. As parallel posters have pointed out, yea, if your 1:1 is spent reporting task status / receiving task direction, woof, that sucks. 1:1s are (as you’ve found) a horrible medium for that, in that they burn your time, your manager’s time, and also are a high-delay channel for that information. In my experience, a good 1:1 is meta-level feedback. I spend a lot of my 1:1s discussing what’s likely/unlikely to come over the horizon in the next 3/6/9 months, both in terms of projects and my personal growth.
2. There are plenty of coachable skills that are not technical, and the average engineer, in my experience, tends to climb the IC ladder via tech skills and then plateau because their non-tech skills are an undeveloped muscle. This is how tech ends up with so many very skilled programmers that have to be hidden in a dark corner because when they talk to another team they accidentally piss everybody off or they get pissed off. As a mundane example of this: I have worked with several developers over the years that write awesome code, but if somebody from another team pinged them and said “hey, can you work on $project”, would just say “sure” or “go pound sand” based on their personal mood w/o any concept of how to prioritize that ask. Time management and prioritization are amazingly important non-technical skills that an effective manager can help coach.
No it's not reporting task status. Some times a high priority issue that he was asked about in some other meeting by a project manager for example that I haven't made good progress on, he'll just mention it. Or just a friendly "how is <this> project going?" how is "<that> interesting feature you are working on going?" chat. Which is fine it but not necessary to be in a 1:1.
I'm not one to believe I can't be taught anything new or training has no place (technical or non-technical), but I don't really see how a 1:1 is an appropriate place for it. Shouldn't it be offered as some training, perhaps even in a group setting to maximize use of time (which is how we organize informal training sessions between the team on topics one might know a lot about), perhaps even offered as a formal training course run or paid for by the organization?
So I don't see what the 1:1 itself is achieving in any of this.
Does your organization not offer internal or external group training opportunities? They’re great, but I’m not sure why you’re presenting them as mutually exclusive with individual coaching.
Coaching generally differs from training in that it’s drawn from actual ongoing circumstance. So you can go to a group training on how to manage your time, where somebody teaches you techniques for prioritizing requests. But a good manager can notice if you’re getting burned by bad prioritization and spend time coaching you based on the specific circumstances you’re hitting.
Well I'm a bit skeptical whether they would or whether it would be better to suggest actual structured courses for me. But either way I don't see how that justifies regular 1:1 when I don't get said coaching. Send a message mentioning their thoughts and ask if I'd like some help with it, and if they think they are the one to give it and other team members would not benefit, great organize a regular call for a few months or do it over slack or whatever.
As I said, I have no problem with a call for a said purpose with an achievable goal. "1:1" is not a goal though, nor is "talk about <x>".
Yes, kind of like training, except it doesn't have a set agenda like a training session would, but is instead rooted in the circumstances of what's going on at that time. Any questions your report has? Anything they are struggling with? Any feedback you have for them? What are they working on longer term and how that's going?
I've never managed senior people, but for junior to mid engineers there is plenty to talk about most weeks. Occasionally there isn't, in which case it's just a 10 min checkin, but the weekly opportunity to raise anything is quite important.
1:1s that are status updates or things that could be resolved over email are definitely an anti-pattern.
An hour seems like too much, but scheduling 30 mins, and leaving the subsequent 30 mins free in case something significant comes up during it, feels right.
Trust erodes surprisingly fast, so even if there’s not a whole lot of substance to discuss, a consistent time to shoot the shit or whatever, is worth the time out of your week. I’d be very worried if I joined a place and there weren’t weekly 1-1s with my manager.
It does depend on company stage though, if it’s very early and the team is small enough to not need these supporting tools, you can probably get away with less frequent 1-1s.
>> but scheduling 30 mins, and leaving the subsequent 30 mins free in case something significant comes up during it, feels right.
Yes! this is an obvious (in hindsight) but pro move. You never want to cut off a direct report in the middle of an important, emotional discussion because "Hey, sorry got another meeting, peace out!"
To the GP: 2 months is too long between real 1:1s, this sounds like more of a career direction discussion or a skip-level with your boss's boss. Or if you're in a really small team/org you might be discussing 1:1 material far more frequently/casually without realizing it. I STILL like explicit, strict 1:1 schedules though because it's time owned by the IC who guides the conversation while the manager listens and figures out how they are going to solve the questions presented. I do very green juniors, people on performance improvement plans and those I'm mentoring for leadership positions every week; everyone else on 2-week schedules. Longer than that makes me nervous, out-of-touch and it's really hard to build personal relationships.
I agree. I had a manager who was really hard to pin down for one on ones. Whenever I asked for performance feedback he said I was fine but surprised me with a poor performance score at the end of the quarter and a bunch of improvement points. This is a great way to demotivate an employee, especially when performance scores are tied to bonuses etc. One on ones are a GREAT time to let employees know if they slipped up or you noticed something they could do better in future.
I personally don't understand 1on1s. I never had them in the teams that I managed and I never wanted to implemented them. They seem like such a huge wast of time. We do have some global talks about raises and global performance every 6 months, but whenever there is an issue or there is something to discuss, we do it as soon as possible. For me they seem like some sort of ritual to show that you are connected to the team or that you care, but I think you show that by actually being there for the team all the time when they need it. Even when we have our 6 months meetings, most of my colleagues just say that we always talk, there nothing much to say extra. The other excuse is also that the team is too big and you need 1on1s to you can have a chat with everyone. If your team is too big, then you might have bigger issues than that, or you just need to delegate so that other people that work closely together take over some of those responsibilities.
worked in a place that did these... I think monthly. for "problems" it was a time to review/discuss some issues that came up recently but that may not have been important enough at the time to interrupt the other party (interrupting a big concerted 'push to live' effort was usually not a good idea). And, it gave you time to reflect on some of those issues, perhaps see patterns, and discuss those.
It was also an actual time that someone carved out specifically for the purposes of talking/listening, instead of things being interruptions. "My door is always open" is fine, except... they're still doing other stuff, and whenever you raise an issue to someone, it will almost certainly be interrupting something else.
Lastly, it was a time/place where you could explore some other ideas that weren't necessarily in any pipeline or backlog.
"you show that by actually being there for the team all the time when they need it". Someone can't simply always be there all the time whenever someone needs it. The urgency/importance level isn't always the same on both sides, and someone is being interrupted. I'm not meaning "save every single issue for a planned meeting 2 weeks from now" but ... scheduled time that is intended specifically for discussion purposes has utility on its own.
My first couple of jobs, the only time you'd ever talk to "a manager" of any sort was when you were in some sort of trouble. If/when you'd get asked to go speak to a manager... it was anxiety inducing, whether it was intended to be or not.
I do bi-weekly 1:1s with my people. Rule 1 of people management: everyone is different.
Some folks need 20 minutes, some want the whole hour. Some have bullet points to discuss, some just need a chat. When the pandemic hit the 1:1 became a place for some people to have vital social interaction. There's others who want to show off their work and receive guidance on next steps.
Reading through all these comments it seems like a lot of people have robotic managers who don't care about people at all. A good manager uses a 1:1 for understanding their needs as an employee and building trust.
I want to ensure my employees are productive, and the 1:1 is the best place to find out how.
In the late 90s/early 2000s, I worked for a fairly large ISP. Every customer-outage since the previous meeting was reviewed by senior management in the morning -- in the parlance, sev-0 and sev-1. This was scheduled for 60 minutes and usually ended early; occasionally ran late. A lot of them were 20 minutes.
I don't like the implication that being busy is indication that something is being accomplished. I would ask the question, what are the outputs of this schedule? If there are meetings that happen but don't have meaningful outputs, then it doesn't matter than you attended them. Perhaps those can be dropped entirely.
A manager with multiple teams should and will likely have team leads for each team. This should be a person who mostly codes, does some leadership for team as well.
Manager shouldn't be micro managing being in daily scrums. Every other day is fine, alternating between teams. Why have a team lead at all?
Working lunches are terrible idea as well. Eat lunch, don't pretend like you're paying attention to the totally coincidental "anti-racism webinar" that just so happened to be on your calendar that day and totally isn't a way to tout HR policies and virtuousness.
Other meetings are quarterly meetings, so that's 1 day out of 90. Let's not pretend that's normal. Meetings with directors shouldn't be every day, EVER.
Not commeinting on this anymore, other than to say that I'm blown away by how wasteful big companies are. After having been at a startup that blew up and went public, and then recently starting a company and being one of 5 engineers, its just obvious that big companies eventually accumulate a whole class of people who do nothing but talk all the time. Those people LOVE hiring other talkers who then hire more talkers who hire scrum masters to make up for the engineering teams getting bombarded by the talkers and so the hell continues.
>Working lunches are terrible idea as well. Eat lunch, don't pretend like you're paying attention to the totally coincidental "anti-racism webinar" that just so happened to be on your calendar that day and totally isn't a way to tout HR policies and virtuousness.
In order to become senior leadership you need to signal you are a leader in corporate values, which means loudly talking about how engaged you are in whatever you think might be what the company wants to thinkits corporate values are. This is very easy when your company is kind enough to literally run a seminar about what its corproate values are.
Well, 30 min standups seem long for what I assume are two groups of 4 people. I'd probably shave off 5 minutes from those every so often until you get it to 15 minutes each. That will net you 2.5 hours a week.
pro-bono project during business hours: sounds silly if you're feeling stressed about time management.
"50 days of learning": continual learning is good idea, but I save this for after work hours, and probably you need to do the same. Especially since you're already doing multiple training sessions a week during the work day.
Going-away get together for team #2 member / virtual happy hour: shouldn't these be happening during "after work" hours?
Finally, 9-5 is banker's hours. A typical 40 hour work week would involve working from 8-12pm, an hour break for lunch, and then from 1pm-5p. If the daily operational review meeting is running from 7:30am-9am you're doing it wrong. It reads like you want credit for attending an early meeting but aren't accounting for the 8am-9am hour?
The reason we stand up in standup meetings is specifically to keep them short. Unless you're Russian Orthodox, you're likely to get impatient after standing up for more than five or ten minutes. The standup format exploits this impatience to create social pressure to keep the meeting to no more than about ten minutes by the simple ritual of remaining standing during the meeting.
From the 30-minute "standups" on the calendar I'm guessing this person is not actually standing up in them. Why is a manager involved in standup meetings at all, though? It seems like that could interfere with communication (as people censor themselves in order not to look bad or make others look bad) and create the potential for the manager to become involved in decisions that properly belong to the individual contributors.
"Standup" meetings where people don't stand up seem like the perfect emblem of Fake Agile: they've adopted our rhetoric, but not only don't they understand our practices, they don't even carry out the motions without understanding them; they just use the words.
(Let's see if some fake woke person who's never been to a Russian Orthodox church will castigate me for being "racist" this time because "Russian Orthodox" contains the word "Russian".)
> Let's see if some fake woke person who's never been to a Russian Orthodox church will castigate me for being "racist" this time because "Russian Orthodox" contains the word "Russian".
Seems unlikely; you can't be racist against Russians.
To the flagged dead person who said, "Seems unlikely; you can't be racist against Russians," I actually did get smeared as "racist against Russians" only a week ago here on Character Assassination News by this other flagged dead person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28591684
Strong disagree on pushing personal development out of working hours. I always tell engineers I work with that they are 100% allowed to take working time and spend it learning skills they need to do their job. I don’t see why that doesn’t apply to managers too (though if it’s cross training prep for a career move that might take you away from the company I might question you doing it on company time).
FWIW, I do support some working hours personal development. My strategy: schedule an hour a week for on the clock training. This works out to about 50h (versus Target's 50d program). This hour is used for:
1. Mandatory "trainings" from HR
2. Reviewing recordings from internal training sessions
3. Attending live training sessions
Critically, these are the things I can only get from the company, and probably wouldn't do if not employed by them. OP is already doing more than 1h per week from what I can see of the schedule. They're also usually directly related to my job in some fashion.
Beyond that, I have also done some conferences, weeklong training sessions and 'work through a book on a tech I'm about to use for a work project' on about an annual basis.
The stuff I do outside work hours:
1. 3-5h/week of reading journal articles and books, on a Kindle at night.
2. About 1h/week of Anki, split between adding new cards based on #1, and daily reviews.
3. As they become available, conference presentation recordings.
4. Like, a lot of podcasts, usually at 1.5x-2x speed. This is basically how I avoid 'screen time' an hour before sleep and would be counterproductive to move to the workday =)
that used to be the case for me, but since we all started working from home my manager started doing team meetings to try to get some of the discussion and help that happens incidentally in the office to have a time scheduled for it. So everyone talks about what they're doing and what difficulties they're having and I want to die as I waste time I could be working.
Your manager should encourage you to do this among your peers all the time. These are not meetings - with agenda, attendees, notes - these are just discussions among 2 or 3 people.
all the time. but its usually more productive in smaller get togethers than in team meetings where everyone 'presents' their stuff. If I'm helping someone else my stuff doesn't matter at that moment.
That, and also after a speculative discussion about what's going on and you find out haphazardly that the team is always waiting for something that should really just be automated, but you mightn't have learned that otherwise. Or after 3 different meetings you keep hearing the same name popup about something. Or something feels off and you find out your lead devs mom just died. Or you find out that they're re-writing some bit of architecture again and you can't fathom why you weren't told about it. Or that someone told you something in private that they might not tell you otherwise. Or you have someone demo the thing to you and it's just crap, way worse than the verbal assessment you were given etc..
So, a lot of talking and meeting. No doing. Color me unsurprised.
A good manager leads the team, finagles resources from upper tiers, un-sticks stuck processes, settles disputes, and then gets the hell out of the way. This manager sucks.
Let me be a little more specific, with one pretty obvious red flag. I see a lot of 1-on-1s, which is fine, but:
1. 30 minutes for a weekly 1 on 1 is pretty long, almost certainly a waste of time.
2. There's nothing after these 1 on 1s along the lines of "Planning time block for resources requested by Team Member B and E" or "Escalation call with Director B to handle sticking point M" or "Handling requirements conflict with product manager C over feature Q"
There are plenty of other issues here, but this is one clear issue. It sounds like this guy is is a highly paid sounding board. There's nothing in this schedule to suggest he's actually acting on information communicated during any of these meetings.
This! ^
If you’re getting tons of info from these meetings, but have no time to do anything to solve or correct those problems/issues, then you’ve created a false expectation and will let down your employees. I prefer the open door policy, ping me when you want to chat.
Many people feel uncomfortable "bugging" higher-ups and "wasting your time" when you have "some many other things to worry about". I've discovered that most people will not initiate, and I need to be the one to reach out and make things happen.
Some of my biggest career snafu's could have been avoided if I just hadn't been so insistent on figuring it out on my own (or letting others do the same).
>30 minutes for a weekly 1 on 1 is pretty long, almost certainly a waste of time.
30 minutes for a weekly 1 on 1 is borderline too short, IMO. It depends on the person, but 1on1s are by far the most valuable and productive meetings that I have, and they often stretch longer than 30 minutes if possible.
>There's nothing after these 1 on 1s along the lines of "Planning time block for resources requested by Team Member B and E" or "Escalation call with Director B to handle sticking point M" or "Handling requirements conflict with product manager C over feature Q"
I count several meetings on their calendar that seem like exactly these things. Some of these things might even be covered during the 1 on 1s which you think are a waste of time.
>It sounds like this guy is is a highly paid sounding board.
Sounding boards are incredibly valuable and useful. We have people at my company that are literally just 40-hour-a-week sounding boards that probably haven't actually "done anything" in years, and they are some of the most critical people in the entire company.
What is a manager for if not to "front line" for their team and take the role of representing the team in meetings, then filtering and distilling that information down into action items? (I'm conflating a little with PM/PO roles, but not much.)
Obviously, discussions around technical decisions are something that engineer input should be required for. But I would argue that many, if not most, meetings that require "your team's" attendance are the ones that the manager should be fielding.
For one, a manager should have the broader context and relationships to better understand the information being presented/decisions being made in the meeting.
For two, time spent in that meeting is engineer time not spent doing the hands-on-keyboard work of software engineering.
If the meeting is for updating teams/disseminating information/resource planning/strategic planning, that is the purview of an engineering manager, and a bit of a waste of time for engineers to be doing/leading.
All of this is written very declaratively, but this is all, of course, my personal opinion; haven't been in software very long, so these are just my current thoughts.
At risk of sounding brash, you have a very traditional (old school) mentality on what management is.
The teams currently seeing the best results are the ones embedding their engineers in the discovery process so they can deeply understand the customer's problems and drive appropriate solutions. It's a bit "less efficient" upfront, but pays dividends during delivery when they can more appropriately model their code and make meaningful decisions without always relying on an outside party.
My role as a manager isn't telling my team how to solve problems. It's helping them identify the most meaningful problems and guiding them towards solutions against those problems. Over time this means that I actually spend less and less time "managing" them and more time listening.
Look at the complete schedule for the week. Almost their entire working hours are totally packed with meetings. Discussions and stand ups and status updates and briefings.
Let's assume all those meetings are productive and necessary and the results could not be achieved in much less time with emails or slack or fewer/shorter meetings. Then he is not putting enough time into each meeting. He has almost no time to prepare, to think about things, to go away and investigate issues with technology more deeply, to make plans, etc. It's just meeting after meeting and thinking by the seat of his pants.
If he is not in a position to seriously participate to the point of making productive input, and asking serious questions or making important decisions in meetings (which he clearly is not given the amount of time he can possibly put into them), then he does not need to be in them. He can skim through minutes to stay generally up to date about those things if he needs/wants.
This is a classic trap that new managers fall into. It's not the number of meetings that you are judged by. It's how effective you are in execution and how well can you drive your team(s). The meetings are just a means to the end.
I've been in management for a long time now and have managed managers. Frankly, I would cut as much as I can and skip as much as possible _while_ being able to do my job - which is to drive results, quality and other team performance metrics.
how much time is typical for 1:1s? At my previous job I had around 30m/week, but at my current job I have 20m every 2 weeks. Not sure what's more common.
If my employer caught wind my workweeks were replete with busywork like this, I'd have a day or two to fix it, or I'd be looking for a new job. This schedule is a bad look and reinforces do-nothing (or little of value) management stereotypes. Maybe there's an upcoming second part to this post that saves face..
I feel like either there are organizational issues, or this guy micromanages. I report to a VP (Fortune 100) and even he has fewer meetings than this guy.
People who attend that many meetings do so because they lack confidence (perhaps rightly) that they can be productive/creative themselves, and so they hide in group activities. The claim that work-weeks like that are necessary / desirable is one of the biggest lies of our industry.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadNot to pick on your comment, because I know this is, sadly, common parlance, but:
Weddings are ceremonies. Meetings at work are just meetings. Sometimes stuff in this field gets so ridiculous and pompous sounding.
I like that they're called ceremonies because it highlights just how ridiculous and pompous this cargo culting has become. To me a ceremony means mostly pointless tradition that is way overdressed.
Our team can put all that stuff in a box and say "we avoid ceremony", and the kind of people that we want to work with will appreciate that and want to work with us.
Having been without an agile lead for a couple months this summer, I'm acutely aware of how much they do, because they're often doing things that I was just letting drop on the floor as non-emergency.
If you need an agile lead, there's something seriously messed up in the management of your org.
I did actually complain about him to my own manager. It didn't go well.
To be a full time position generally involves a lot of administrative work or covering multiple teams. Talking to management is kind of a catch all but generally it’s interfacing with the rest of the world outside of clients. Legwork on security clearances, making sure all the boxes on contracts are checked, and or enduring the team has all the hardware software they need etc.
It tends to be more important in less software oriented companies.
The immediate thing that raises questions is your meetings with "Team #1" and "Team #2", which is a bit unusual. General practice is that it takes a manager per team; so if you're managing two teams yourself then it's expected that you'll be overloaded (and if there's not many people then perhaps you can't afford the overhead of managing them as two separate teams and need to "merge" them in practice, having one common meeting instead of two separate ones) and on the other hand if there are separate team leads for these teams, then I'd argue that you don't need to participate in as many direct meetings as you do and instead delegate more to them and the teams themselves. If you "need to know" then perhaps review the meeting minutes without direct participation.
But then this reply is just full of "I don't actually know what your on-the-ground reality is, but that definitely won't stop me from telling you what you're doing wrong".
In your big-T Team, would you schedule a separate daily standup for each of the task/project small-t team you're supervising, and organize separate social events for each of your "groups of teammates" as OP is doing?
If all you have is a hammer...
On the other hand, I get a lot of managers who ask my opinion about how they are running things, which for me starts with "why did you make the decisions you made up to now and tell me what is or is not working", not "let me give you my dissertation on the One True Way...".
IMHO he should devote less meeting time to each of them or merge some of the meetings.
Fair enough, "less time in meetings" is always something to pursue. Perhaps aggressively, even ruthlessly. Lawyers schedule meetings in 6m increments and I've considered it. Unless the OP can't, for any number of reasons. Which we don't know.
N.B. - I get lots of time back teaching people that if you think you only need 15m, then it's pretty easy to only schedule 15m and not 30m just because it's the default (in Outlook).
would you schedule a separate daily standup for each of the task/project small-t team you're supervising
Since 'standup' implies things that do not apply to how my team organizes work, I'm pretty sure 'no'. You'd need to know that to advise. Kinda my point.
and organize separate social events for each of your "groups of teammates" as OP is doing
I see:
4:30 PM — Going-away get together for team #2 member
Which in no way implies separate social events.
If you mean:
9:00 AM — Holidays peak preparation meeting for team #1 1:00 PM — Holidays peak preparation meeting for team #2
I guess it could be social. But since it explicitly says "peak", I'm slightly skeptical that in the real world it means anything other than organizing operational coverage when lots of people are taking time off for whatever they're working on.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
also, do 1-1s need to be weekly? what about biweekly? i only have a few direct reports and even then i feel weekly is too often
Most of these rules of thumb came about before tools like slack, which for better or worse, let you communicate more directly more frequently.
I’ve been doing this tech stuff a long time. Companies I worked at started doing regular 1 on 1s before regular use of instant messaging. More importantly, the heuristics most use for 1 on 1s clearly came before use of instant messaging and digital collaboration tools.
The obvious exceptions are new hires and very junior engineers who need more handholding while they ramp up.
1-1s aren't about how _you_ feel. They're about your directs's feelings, and the relationship between the two of you.
But the manager isn't the person who can easily make that judgement call. IMO, the correct person to judge that is the direct -- they can't just show up at their managers desk and demand a 30 minute meeting when something important shows up, whereas a manager can (and often does!)
Generally ideas like this seem to spread because it was part of some successful company and so it got written up and now a lot of people copy it because it's easy to copy and they think it will help make their own company successful.
As a result, the thing that actually occurs in a lot of places is a manager reading from a script that they've been trained on a little bit from someone else.
It does not feel useful to me.
Also, I think all managers should be asking what cadence and length of time their directs want for 1:1.
The least would be 30 minutes bi-weekly IMO.
The most would be 1 hour weekly.
Depends on the person, the projects, where they are in their career, etc.
I have 20 years of experience in this field, and a vital part of the job is communicating well with other people. I do not need someone's "Management Best Practices Checklist" in order to do that. And I do not think I'm exceptional: most of us got by just fine without all this.
For one example, a manager who has regular 1:1s with their reports probably won't be blindsided when they quit or miss a deadline.
For reports who need a bit of a support in raising issues, this is an effective way to make that space. People new to lecturing are often taught to count out 30 seconds after asking questions, for a good reason: silence is awkward, and questions are the salve that even shy students will reluctantly reach for.
Also, there is stuff that needs to be discussed that shouldn’t be in an email or be discussed out in the open. You know, things meetings are actually good for.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it sounds unhealthy to have that much of that kind of stuff that you'd need to discuss it with no record of it on a regular basis.
These are all simultaneously fine. When I miss one with a weekly regular, nobody frets. When I miss one with a biweekly, I make sure to reschedule if it makes sense. And I always make time ASAP for someone who doesn't usually want that meeting, when they ask for it.
Feel free to continue to evaluate my performance on the basis of my word-choice here rather than the actual management process I was describing.
The things that truly matter – 1:1s, own team stand-ups... - only take about 8 hours per week.
I think somebody's going to say "you or your manager were failing to extract what you could from those meetings, that's why they seemed useless," or something like that. But I really just think they weren't necessary to do that often.
If bi-weekly works for you and your reports, do that. However I would argue that 1:1 is the one area you shouldn't try to minimise - as a manager, spending time coaching and developing your reports is a large part of your job. The time you spend on them should be highly valuable. If you or your reports think 1:1s are a waste of time, something is going wrong and you need to change how you do that.
If a 1:1 is just a way to surface problems with the employee and plan skills progression, weekly is way too much. Even monthly, there is hardly something new going on, in my experience.
I think this happens because of deep issues with how companies operate, which is a frustrating and painful issue to deal with upper management.
The problem with skill progressions in most companies I've seen is that they're something meant to retain engineers, while what engineers are hired for is to build a product. Once you're not a junior engineer anymore, you have probably seen all the technical tasks you can do. What are you going to learn next? Functional programming? Cool, it will come in handy to fix pixels on buttons.
Some companies are better than others. From what I've seen, it's worse where skills progressions are basically irrelevant for promotions and raises and the only factors that matter are product related.
It's hard for an engineer to get the time out of their busy schedules. I've seen two types of engineers. Those who don't care about their career and spend as much company time learning something to show off at their next interview and those who care so much about the product that they don't have time. I'm sure just the notion of these factors being in play influence the way mentees portray themselves to mentors. If you don't trust your mentor and you know there is no punishment or reward for not learning whatever skill is important to learn, you'll just say you didn't have time to learn it and focus on the product.
I promote explicitly scheduled focus time (ex: 4 hours twice a week of "GSD"). Also a good manager will know when they really don't need to probe on current health & status and happily call a meeting early. I wish more meetings ended with "we're done 30 minutes early!"
It should also be a scheduling priority. A 1:1 may not seem super important, but it's often the only time an employee will have to talk with their boss. Repeatedly cancelling it (especially last-minute) is an indicator that your employees are not a priority and that can destroy trust and kill morale.
Most reasons for the call could be replaced just by emailing agenda items to me, and allowing me to respond with any issues, then based on that and what is on the agenda we could decide to have a call but most of the time we wouldn't. And if we did to get past something in particular, it would be like 10 minutes not 60.
My manager is not technical though and can't really coach me about much. It seems strange that 1:1 time would be used to coach and develop technical staff -- what do you mean by this exactly? Some kind of training?
I am not the one who schedules these 1:1 meetings though. Manager is. Cardinal rule of meetings should be only schedule them if you have an achievable goal for them which is not better achieved with email or IM. And the goal can't be "talk about X".
I don't have a strong desire to push back against it. My schedule is not one that is full of meetings, and most of the ones I do have are interesting and enjoyable technical ones. And the manager is a nice person who means well and probably gets pressure from above to schedule them. And blabbering on for 30 minutes per week isn't terrible. It's just not at all productive or useful for me to be spending that long on a 1:1 as far as I can see.
For my team members, one of my reports started an agenda doc with the things they wanted to talk about allowing us to stay focused, I add things to the doc too and it works really well. When we have nothing on the agenda, we don't have the one on one. It worked so well, I now do it with all of my reports (and the peers and management types that I report to).
Don't get me wrong at all, he's a lovely person and means well. The 1:1 does not irritate me as such, my week is not loaded up with meetings. If that was different, I would gently try to change things. I also think he is getting pressure from above to meet various metrics like 1:1 time.
I just don't get much out of it that couldn't be replaced by a couple of minute slack or email once in a while when things come up. And I accept it might work well for others.
1. As parallel posters have pointed out, yea, if your 1:1 is spent reporting task status / receiving task direction, woof, that sucks. 1:1s are (as you’ve found) a horrible medium for that, in that they burn your time, your manager’s time, and also are a high-delay channel for that information. In my experience, a good 1:1 is meta-level feedback. I spend a lot of my 1:1s discussing what’s likely/unlikely to come over the horizon in the next 3/6/9 months, both in terms of projects and my personal growth.
2. There are plenty of coachable skills that are not technical, and the average engineer, in my experience, tends to climb the IC ladder via tech skills and then plateau because their non-tech skills are an undeveloped muscle. This is how tech ends up with so many very skilled programmers that have to be hidden in a dark corner because when they talk to another team they accidentally piss everybody off or they get pissed off. As a mundane example of this: I have worked with several developers over the years that write awesome code, but if somebody from another team pinged them and said “hey, can you work on $project”, would just say “sure” or “go pound sand” based on their personal mood w/o any concept of how to prioritize that ask. Time management and prioritization are amazingly important non-technical skills that an effective manager can help coach.
I'm not one to believe I can't be taught anything new or training has no place (technical or non-technical), but I don't really see how a 1:1 is an appropriate place for it. Shouldn't it be offered as some training, perhaps even in a group setting to maximize use of time (which is how we organize informal training sessions between the team on topics one might know a lot about), perhaps even offered as a formal training course run or paid for by the organization?
So I don't see what the 1:1 itself is achieving in any of this.
It does.
> They’re great, but I’m not sure why you’re presenting them as mutually exclusive with individual coaching.
I'm not, it just sounded to me like time management and prioritization were skills better taught in training courses or group sessions.
I'm still not clear on what this coaching really looks like, or why it is appropriate for a regular 1:1 call.
As I said, I have no problem with a call for a said purpose with an achievable goal. "1:1" is not a goal though, nor is "talk about <x>".
I've never managed senior people, but for junior to mid engineers there is plenty to talk about most weeks. Occasionally there isn't, in which case it's just a 10 min checkin, but the weekly opportunity to raise anything is quite important.
1:1s that are status updates or things that could be resolved over email are definitely an anti-pattern.
Trust erodes surprisingly fast, so even if there’s not a whole lot of substance to discuss, a consistent time to shoot the shit or whatever, is worth the time out of your week. I’d be very worried if I joined a place and there weren’t weekly 1-1s with my manager.
It does depend on company stage though, if it’s very early and the team is small enough to not need these supporting tools, you can probably get away with less frequent 1-1s.
Yes! this is an obvious (in hindsight) but pro move. You never want to cut off a direct report in the middle of an important, emotional discussion because "Hey, sorry got another meeting, peace out!"
To the GP: 2 months is too long between real 1:1s, this sounds like more of a career direction discussion or a skip-level with your boss's boss. Or if you're in a really small team/org you might be discussing 1:1 material far more frequently/casually without realizing it. I STILL like explicit, strict 1:1 schedules though because it's time owned by the IC who guides the conversation while the manager listens and figures out how they are going to solve the questions presented. I do very green juniors, people on performance improvement plans and those I'm mentoring for leadership positions every week; everyone else on 2-week schedules. Longer than that makes me nervous, out-of-touch and it's really hard to build personal relationships.
It was also an actual time that someone carved out specifically for the purposes of talking/listening, instead of things being interruptions. "My door is always open" is fine, except... they're still doing other stuff, and whenever you raise an issue to someone, it will almost certainly be interrupting something else.
Lastly, it was a time/place where you could explore some other ideas that weren't necessarily in any pipeline or backlog.
"you show that by actually being there for the team all the time when they need it". Someone can't simply always be there all the time whenever someone needs it. The urgency/importance level isn't always the same on both sides, and someone is being interrupted. I'm not meaning "save every single issue for a planned meeting 2 weeks from now" but ... scheduled time that is intended specifically for discussion purposes has utility on its own.
My first couple of jobs, the only time you'd ever talk to "a manager" of any sort was when you were in some sort of trouble. If/when you'd get asked to go speak to a manager... it was anxiety inducing, whether it was intended to be or not.
Some folks need 20 minutes, some want the whole hour. Some have bullet points to discuss, some just need a chat. When the pandemic hit the 1:1 became a place for some people to have vital social interaction. There's others who want to show off their work and receive guidance on next steps.
Reading through all these comments it seems like a lot of people have robotic managers who don't care about people at all. A good manager uses a 1:1 for understanding their needs as an employee and building trust.
I want to ensure my employees are productive, and the 1:1 is the best place to find out how.
A manager with multiple teams should and will likely have team leads for each team. This should be a person who mostly codes, does some leadership for team as well.
Manager shouldn't be micro managing being in daily scrums. Every other day is fine, alternating between teams. Why have a team lead at all?
Working lunches are terrible idea as well. Eat lunch, don't pretend like you're paying attention to the totally coincidental "anti-racism webinar" that just so happened to be on your calendar that day and totally isn't a way to tout HR policies and virtuousness.
Other meetings are quarterly meetings, so that's 1 day out of 90. Let's not pretend that's normal. Meetings with directors shouldn't be every day, EVER.
Not commeinting on this anymore, other than to say that I'm blown away by how wasteful big companies are. After having been at a startup that blew up and went public, and then recently starting a company and being one of 5 engineers, its just obvious that big companies eventually accumulate a whole class of people who do nothing but talk all the time. Those people LOVE hiring other talkers who then hire more talkers who hire scrum masters to make up for the engineering teams getting bombarded by the talkers and so the hell continues.
In order to become senior leadership you need to signal you are a leader in corporate values, which means loudly talking about how engaged you are in whatever you think might be what the company wants to thinkits corporate values are. This is very easy when your company is kind enough to literally run a seminar about what its corproate values are.
Well, yea. You're a manager :)
> Which meetings would you cut?
Well, 30 min standups seem long for what I assume are two groups of 4 people. I'd probably shave off 5 minutes from those every so often until you get it to 15 minutes each. That will net you 2.5 hours a week.
pro-bono project during business hours: sounds silly if you're feeling stressed about time management.
"50 days of learning": continual learning is good idea, but I save this for after work hours, and probably you need to do the same. Especially since you're already doing multiple training sessions a week during the work day.
Going-away get together for team #2 member / virtual happy hour: shouldn't these be happening during "after work" hours?
Finally, 9-5 is banker's hours. A typical 40 hour work week would involve working from 8-12pm, an hour break for lunch, and then from 1pm-5p. If the daily operational review meeting is running from 7:30am-9am you're doing it wrong. It reads like you want credit for attending an early meeting but aren't accounting for the 8am-9am hour?
From the 30-minute "standups" on the calendar I'm guessing this person is not actually standing up in them. Why is a manager involved in standup meetings at all, though? It seems like that could interfere with communication (as people censor themselves in order not to look bad or make others look bad) and create the potential for the manager to become involved in decisions that properly belong to the individual contributors.
"Standup" meetings where people don't stand up seem like the perfect emblem of Fake Agile: they've adopted our rhetoric, but not only don't they understand our practices, they don't even carry out the motions without understanding them; they just use the words.
(Let's see if some fake woke person who's never been to a Russian Orthodox church will castigate me for being "racist" this time because "Russian Orthodox" contains the word "Russian".)
Seems unlikely; you can't be racist against Russians.
https://satwcomic.com/white-on-white-hate-crime
The comic you linked also makes an excellent point about the nature of racism: https://satwcomic.com/white-on-white-hate-crime
1. Mandatory "trainings" from HR 2. Reviewing recordings from internal training sessions 3. Attending live training sessions
Critically, these are the things I can only get from the company, and probably wouldn't do if not employed by them. OP is already doing more than 1h per week from what I can see of the schedule. They're also usually directly related to my job in some fashion.
Beyond that, I have also done some conferences, weeklong training sessions and 'work through a book on a tech I'm about to use for a work project' on about an annual basis.
The stuff I do outside work hours:
1. 3-5h/week of reading journal articles and books, on a Kindle at night. 2. About 1h/week of Anki, split between adding new cards based on #1, and daily reviews. 3. As they become available, conference presentation recordings. 4. Like, a lot of podcasts, usually at 1.5x-2x speed. This is basically how I avoid 'screen time' an hour before sleep and would be counterproductive to move to the workday =)
A good manager leads the team, finagles resources from upper tiers, un-sticks stuck processes, settles disputes, and then gets the hell out of the way. This manager sucks.
Like, I get what you're saying, but I think it might be a little unproductive to consider all communication work as "not doing."
1. 30 minutes for a weekly 1 on 1 is pretty long, almost certainly a waste of time.
2. There's nothing after these 1 on 1s along the lines of "Planning time block for resources requested by Team Member B and E" or "Escalation call with Director B to handle sticking point M" or "Handling requirements conflict with product manager C over feature Q"
There are plenty of other issues here, but this is one clear issue. It sounds like this guy is is a highly paid sounding board. There's nothing in this schedule to suggest he's actually acting on information communicated during any of these meetings.
Many people feel uncomfortable "bugging" higher-ups and "wasting your time" when you have "some many other things to worry about". I've discovered that most people will not initiate, and I need to be the one to reach out and make things happen.
Some of my biggest career snafu's could have been avoided if I just hadn't been so insistent on figuring it out on my own (or letting others do the same).
30 minutes for a weekly 1 on 1 is borderline too short, IMO. It depends on the person, but 1on1s are by far the most valuable and productive meetings that I have, and they often stretch longer than 30 minutes if possible.
>There's nothing after these 1 on 1s along the lines of "Planning time block for resources requested by Team Member B and E" or "Escalation call with Director B to handle sticking point M" or "Handling requirements conflict with product manager C over feature Q"
I count several meetings on their calendar that seem like exactly these things. Some of these things might even be covered during the 1 on 1s which you think are a waste of time.
>It sounds like this guy is is a highly paid sounding board.
Sounding boards are incredibly valuable and useful. We have people at my company that are literally just 40-hour-a-week sounding boards that probably haven't actually "done anything" in years, and they are some of the most critical people in the entire company.
If I'm in meeting that my report could have led/attended instead, that's a failure on my part.
Obviously, discussions around technical decisions are something that engineer input should be required for. But I would argue that many, if not most, meetings that require "your team's" attendance are the ones that the manager should be fielding.
For one, a manager should have the broader context and relationships to better understand the information being presented/decisions being made in the meeting.
For two, time spent in that meeting is engineer time not spent doing the hands-on-keyboard work of software engineering.
If the meeting is for updating teams/disseminating information/resource planning/strategic planning, that is the purview of an engineering manager, and a bit of a waste of time for engineers to be doing/leading.
All of this is written very declaratively, but this is all, of course, my personal opinion; haven't been in software very long, so these are just my current thoughts.
The teams currently seeing the best results are the ones embedding their engineers in the discovery process so they can deeply understand the customer's problems and drive appropriate solutions. It's a bit "less efficient" upfront, but pays dividends during delivery when they can more appropriately model their code and make meaningful decisions without always relying on an outside party.
My role as a manager isn't telling my team how to solve problems. It's helping them identify the most meaningful problems and guiding them towards solutions against those problems. Over time this means that I actually spend less and less time "managing" them and more time listening.
Let's assume all those meetings are productive and necessary and the results could not be achieved in much less time with emails or slack or fewer/shorter meetings. Then he is not putting enough time into each meeting. He has almost no time to prepare, to think about things, to go away and investigate issues with technology more deeply, to make plans, etc. It's just meeting after meeting and thinking by the seat of his pants.
If he is not in a position to seriously participate to the point of making productive input, and asking serious questions or making important decisions in meetings (which he clearly is not given the amount of time he can possibly put into them), then he does not need to be in them. He can skim through minutes to stay generally up to date about those things if he needs/wants.
I've been in management for a long time now and have managed managers. Frankly, I would cut as much as I can and skip as much as possible _while_ being able to do my job - which is to drive results, quality and other team performance metrics.
When are the action items from all the 1:1s, standups, etc worked on ?